Category: Uncategorized

Find Flash, Flex and AIR Jobs on Twitter

If you are looking to hire someone who knows Flash platform technologies, or you are a developer looking for a new gig, I have started a new Twitter identity that might help out. Go and check out @flashjobs.

Over the past few years I have probably seen hundreds of requests from agencies, small businesses and enterprises who are struggling to find developers with Flash, Flex or AIR experience. Usually I would pass them on to recruiters or every once in a while I would pass them on to someone that I knew was looking for work. Despite the current economic conditions, I am still getting requests.

In the never ending quest to remove things from my inbox, I setup this account on Twitter where I will be posting job listings that I find worthy of the great developers who are following the account. It will be a short description of the listing and a URL for more information.

If you would like to post a job to this account, please send an email to daniel.dura@gmail.com with a URL to the job listing and a short description. I will then post it to the Twitter account for developers to see. For developers who are following the account, you can be instantly notified through Twitter of new openings that are available by following @flashjobs. If you are looking for a good Twitter desktop client, check out TweetDeck.

Just as a quick FYI, I also have @flexjobs, but I don’t plan on using it at the moment. All Flash platform related jobs will be posted to this one Twitter account for the time being.

Launched: WordPress Comment Moderator AIR Application

I have just released the alpha version of my WordPress Plugin, dubbed Moderator. This application, as discussed in previous posts, allows you to moderate comments from your desktop. Please make sure and read the official page for notes and warnings, this is an early release and as such will have bugs. But it is usable and marks the first official public release of the application.

Official Moderator Page and Download

Currently on Vacation

For everyone who has been emailing about my TwitterCamp application or leaving comments that aren’t being moderated, I just wanted to let you know that I am currently on vacation with my wife in beautiful New Zealand and will not be back until May 7th. I will be sure and catch up with my online correspondence when I get back, but for now I am just going to enjoy the amazingly beautiful land around me and try suck in the fresh air!

Ads in Syndicated News Feeds

It has begun. Don’t you hear that? It is the marching on of the great advertising behemoths of the world. It seems that now they are targeting your news reader and web based news aggregators. I can’t say that I am surprised. We all knew that syndicated news feeds would eventually become a medium for marketers to reach a very targeted audience. The question is, will this be done tastefully?

There is no doubt that some people think that all sites should be ad free. I don’t believe that is really an intelligent answer to the question of adding ads to web sites. These are usually the same people that don’t want to pay for the content either. So, how are the content providers to make money? I think advertising definitely has its place as long as it is done in the right way. Google has done a good job of this. Although I would say that I rarely click on one of the infamous Google ads, I have been found on occasion to click the link. Part of the reason is because of how tastefully the ads are placed most of the time. They do not distract from the main content and usually are very targeted to the page I am visiting. I have a sense of achieving a balance with the site I am visiting. I realize that they need to make a living, and I put up with it as long as they don’t throw it in my face.

So, what about ads in news feeds? I always thought it was a bit strange that I could take their content, format it the way I want in my feed reader, and basically have no need for the site and their advertisement. Obviously the content providers see this as a problem. What have they done to correct this? They insert the ad in the feed so you will see it whether you are on their site, or viewing the content in you news reader or aggregator.

I think there is definitely room for abuse of this new advertising medium. Many content providers only provide a snippet of information in the feed in hopes to entice you to visit their actual site. Their is nothing wrong with this practice in general, but when you do this the viewer will see the ads on the main site. So, when you try to add an ad to the feed in this case, it is similar to ‘double dipping.’ Viewers now see the ad in the feed and on the site providing the feed.

On the other hand, when the feed provides the complete content of the article in the feed (as I do on this site), adding an ad to the feed is just recouping the lost views you would have received had the viewer visited the site to read the entire article.

So, I think this boils down to good practice. I can see a future where I might very well add ads into my feed. But, what I would do in that case is probably provide two feeds. One feed would be short excerpts without ads, and the other would be full articles with ads. Most web based news aggregators, such as MXNA 2.0, would probably use the feed without ads. Whereas, if you were using an news reader on your desktop, you might want to use the feed with the full article that contains an ad.

I am curious though, what are your thoughts? Does this seem like a good compromise to you?

Flex on the Desktop

Although many of you may not have been able to attend the Sneak Peaks session at MAX 2004, you should have been able to view the video my brother posted. One of the items I showed at the ‘Sneaks’ was a Flex based application I built running in Central. This application, which I dubbed FAB (Flex Amazon Browser), allows the user to browse the Amazon.com catalog of products, cache items, read reviews, and receive alerts when items change. It runs in both the browser and Central, and really shows off how exciting this new technology is. I put this project together a month or two ago as a demo internally and now I am going to make it available on my site. I should have it up by the end of the week. Until then, I have posted some links on how you can build Flex apps that run in both the browser and the desktop using Macromedia Central.

MAX 2004 Sneak Peak Session Video

Head over to my brother’s blog and check out the MAX 2004 Sneak Peak session video he took. Although it doesn’t catch the entire session (which went really well), he was able to tape the Flash Player, Flash Authoring, Flex, and Central demos. This was the first time the Flash Authoring demos were shown publicly, and I think they were received really well. I showed off some of the prototypes the Central team has come up with and they also seemed to generate a lot of buzz. Anyways, head over to Josh’s blog and enjoy sucking down some of our server’s bandwidth 🙂